Today's question came over the transom via a swim team buddy from high school. Someone...
…told me that ‘big pharma’ has a cure for cancer but is sitting on it because they make more money off the chemo drugs. I asked her how that could be 'cuz there are 200-300 types of blood cancers alone, according to a pathologist friend of mine. But she insisted it was true, and [that] prostate cancer was the main one!
Story lines like this hit my urban legend trip-wire. They remind me of hanging around my dad's used car lot at First and
For the claim of a suppressed "cancer cure," I'll first mention some reasons for skepticism, then an example that could lend a little support to the conspiracy theorists.
Reasons to be skeptical
First and foremost, this particular example doesn't make sense. Prostate cancer is about the only cancer whose progress is normally so slow that "no treatment" is sometimes a valid medical option. As a population, patients with this diagnosis are likely to die of something else before the prostate cancer reaches lethal proportions. So, if you want to start a scandal rumor, get smarter. You picked the wrong medical condition for your conspiracy theories.
Conspiracies and cartels
Many years ago, I heard a Stanford economics professor address the question of the OPEC oil cartel. He did so by explaining the inherent instability of any cartel. Built into the cartel mechanism are the seeds of its own failure. The cycle goes something like this:
- All or most of the suppliers of something decide to cooperate to control the price, with the goal of limiting the supply so that their product is not available from anyone except the cartel, ensuring that they will get their preferred price.
- If few competitors exist outside the cartel, the price control mechanism goes into effect.
- The cartel discovers that it has an unavoidable task: to tell each of its members how much of the artificially-costly product they can produce and sell. Not all of them will be happy with their allocation. Maybe a lot of them are unhappy with their allocation.
- Some smart person in one of the unhappy units of the cartel gets out his abacus and figures, "We could make a dump-truck load more money if we left this dang cartel, cut our prices ever so slightly, and siphoned off a ton of business by beating the cartel-enforced price."
- They do.
- The decay of cartel loyalty and control is begun. As others defect and cut their prices to raise their sales volume, the cartel's efforts to enforce its high price against the free-market defectors actually help accelerate the disintegration of the cartel.
Similar to cartels, conspiracies that depend on absolute confidentiality and secrecy are horribly unstable. For them to disintegrate, it doesn't even take a monetary incentive. All that has to happen is that one of the parties to the secret conspiracy has to get hacked off, and blab.
From "quackwatch.com," a Snopes-type website for medical issues:
What about scientists who discover new treatments? If they can demonstrate effectiveness, publishing their data will bring them fame and fortune. The benefits could include research grants, academic promotion, enhanced research facilities, speaking invitations, honors, awards, and other career opportunities. Even scientists who are selfish and greedy would have much to gain by making their information public—and so would the institutions in which they work.
What about drug companies? Won't they simply abandon a new drug that threatens their existing drugs? This scenario is also far-fetched. Drug companies are continuously looking for new drugs, because existing drugs have patents that will run out. Also, any company that can market a new drug that is effective against cancer will come out billions of dollars ahead, even if existing drugs become obsolete. Some conspiracy theorists claim that drug companies ignore "natural" substances that cannot be patented and therefore cannot be profitable. However, if a natural substance is found useful, drug companies can develop related chemicals that are more effective.
Even if a short-sighted drug company executive decided to suppress a new drug because it was too effective, the scientists involved might still go public with the information, for the general good if for no other reason. Among the dozens of people who have inside knowledge, someone is likely to have a conscience. The need for drug company support could be eliminated by obtaining a grant from the National Cancer Institute. Also, if the treatment really worked, other researchers would eventually be able to demonstrate to the world that the treatment did in fact cure cancer. This has never been done for any supposedly 'suppressed' cancer cure.
A reason to believe it could happen
A company where I worked sold a medical infusion pump worn on the arm or on the torso to a competing pharmaceutical and medical device company many years ago. It was a case of a competitor buying a competitor. We worked with them to get our product through its final development stages and onto the market, but our engineers felt that the client / acquirer was moving very slowly. Even if this was true, it wasn't a case of a "better fix" being held off the market. It was an example of an existing fix being held on the market, by neutralizing a new entrant. I would like to think our pump was better, but if the acquiring company thought "we own both products now, and we're sticking with Product A, which is already out there and doing just fine," that's a legitimate business tactic. Even at that, it was very expensive for them to prevent a new entrant coming into the market--in essence, we got "paid" for our product by having a competitor buy all of our product, instead of having to fight that competitor to give retail customers an opportunity to buy any of our product. This is about the only example I ran across in 30 years in the industry.
Bottom line
To believe that a cancer cure is being held off the market by the companies who are supposedly searching for cancer cures, you have to believe that all the following things are absolutely true:
- The cure was developed in the pharma industry, and is highly effective. If so, hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of people have to have been involved. How will all the people who know about it be silenced with perfect, 100% certainty?
- The cure is so certain to make present therapy obsolete that it is being held off the market, despite being worth billions itself. Come on, folks. Only about a hundred drugs have an annual revenue line of a billion or more. Versus a sure and certain cancer cure? No contest, cancer cure wins and gets to the market.
- The secret has leaked to the Internet, email-forwarding strings, gym discussions, barbershops and cab drivers, but is still somehow so closely held that nobody can ever catch the villains at it. Huh?
